This Sunday on 60 Minutes: 'Your Boy's Got Breasts' But He Wants to Change Back...

This Sunday on 60 Minutes: 'Your Boy's Got Breasts' But He Wants to Change Back...

On Sunday, the Australian version of "60 Minutes" will feature an interview with a 12-year-old Australian boy who once wanted to be a girl. The preteen started taking estrogen, but then he changed his mind.

"You wish you could just change everything about you, you just see any girl and you say, 'I'd kill to be like that,'" Patrick Mitchell told 60 Minutes in a trailer for the show Sunday.

Mitchell begged his mother, Alison, to allow him to begin taking estrogen hormones after doctors diagnosed him with gender dysphoria — the persistent sense of being born in the wrong body.

"When he was young, he would dress up in girl's clothes, and at one stage he did say to me, could he be taken to the doctor to be made into a girl," the boy's mother said. "He was on a pathway to create a life with himself as a female."

But later, the mother recalled him changing his mind. "He looked me in the eye and said, 'I'm just not sure that I am a girl,'" she recalled.

In a teaser for the show, veteran journalist Ross Coulthart tells the mother, "Your boy's got breasts." The real question — can Mitchell reverse the transgender process that he started?

The boy changed his mind after two years. During that time, he grew out his hair and started taking the hormones, which caused his body to grow breats.

At the beginning of this year, teachers at school started referring to him as a girl, and that triggered him to question whether or not he really had made the right decision. "I began to realize I was actually comfortable with my body. Every day I just felt better," he told Now To Love.

"I wasn't nervous to tell Mum of my decision — she'd been so open and supportive of me in my transition," he added.

This transition back to Mitchell's birth gender might be shocking to many transgender activists, but many transgender children actually revert to their birth gender as they get older. There has been vigorous debate about the statistic that 80 percent of children who identify as transgender will later "desist" back to their birth sex. The figure may not be that high, but it stands to reason that this would be a common phenomenon.